Recently the company Automattic, creator of well-known plugins such as Jetpack and WooCommerce, has launched a payment solution for WooCommerce known as WooCommerce Payments , which offers – in its own words – simple payments, without monthly fees, for WooCommerce stores.
Well, my advice is that, at least if your business is in Spain, don’t use WooCommerce Payments , for various reasons.
Index of contents
WooCommerce Payments is an intermediary platform for Stripe
Exactly, the payment method that you will be using if you activate WooCommerce Payments is the well-known Stripe payment gateway, but without directly accessing it in any case .
In fact, if you have a Stripe account you can’t use it with WooCommerce Payments , because you don’t actually open an account with Stripe but with WooCommerce Payments .
Actually, the one who has an account in Stripe is Automattic, through its WooCommerce Payments product , and your online store will be like another WooCommerce Payments store, as if it were a marketplace, as if you were selling through Amazon so you understand me.
In case you have any doubts, in order to create an account in WooCommerce Payments, you need to have a WordPress.com account and log in with it for registration.
This, of course, raises practical issues, such as that between you and your customers, when it comes to payments, there are 2 intermediary companies: Stripe and Automattic / WooCommerce Payments , but you will only have an account and actually contact with WooCommerce Payments.
Legally, you lose a lot with the change. While Stripe is a recognized entity throughout Europe, and in Spain of course, as an authorized payment gateway, even having its own entity as a company in Spain, Stripe Spain SI, registered with the CNAE , is not the case with WooCommerce Payments, which In reality it is not even a company, but a service associated with Automattic, a company registered in the US , and dependent on US legislation.
I do not even want to imagine the problems that may arise in case of disputes with clients, let alone if one reaches the courts. Legal concoction can be book. This is so much so that the terms and conditions of the service in which you register are those of Automattic, hosted on WordPress.com , with all that that entails in terms of the legal complications of contracting with a company in the state of California (USA ) .
Privacy, data protection and fraud protection
That said, you will be imagining that it is not the same to host data and transactions of your clients through a payment gateway under the umbrella of the European Union, such as Stripe, than if you do it through a company in California (USA) .
You will depend on the changes in terms of the changing safe harbor relationships between Europe and the US , with what this entails of paperwork, express authorizations, privacy statements, etc. Everything is more complicated .
The laws of privacy, data protection and protection against fraud of the European Union countries are much more guaranteeing than those of the US, so you could end up compromising the security and privacy of your customers without knowing it, and you could even have legal problems in case of disputes, data leaks, etc.
Rates are more expensive than Stripe
Actually, what WooCommerce Payments does is have a volume account, or resale of services
, through which it offers you the standard Stripe rates , these in particular without improvements or losses in the general rates, and Automattic takes the commission of the differential between the standard rate and the one that they have managed to negotiate through the volume account , and up to now well in this sense.
Now, this is the case for standard fees, but if you use other Stripe payment methods , such as SEPA debits or others, the fees are more expensive with WooCommerce Payments than directly with Stripe .
Less functionality than using directly in Stripe
To all of the above, we must add that you have less functionality with WooCommerce Payments than if you use Stripe directly .
- You do not have details of the specific payment method (SOFORT, SEPA, gyropay, credit / debit cards, etc.) used by your clients, in all it appears only as Stripe.
- You don’t have customer details, like you do on the desktop of a Stripe account.
- There is data of yours that you still have to manage in a limited Stripe desktop, and also accessing with your WooCommerce Payments account credentials.
- You cannot use other Stripe services like Radar, Capital or Terminal.
Bad cross-selling practices in your WordPress
In addition to all the above, the important thing, I also have to highlight the bad practice that Automattic is doing with the promotion of WooCommerce Payments in any WordPress installation that has WooCommerce installed.
To begin, in the WooCommerce installation wizard , in the business details step, if you simply answer the 2 questions that are shown when you reach this step and press the button to continue, you will be shown an installation acceptance of « Recommended business features for your business ”, and in fact, if you don’t open the drop-down, you have unknowingly accepted the installation of no less than 4 Automattic plugins / services, including WooCommerce Payments .
This is so because these « Free features » are in a second tab, which if you click on the follow button in the first open tab by default, it is shown without displaying, and all the services that you do not see unless you open the drop-down, are active for default .
Ok, it is not forbidden, but I find it misleading to show hidden under the drop-down everything that is going to be installed , with the claim that they are recommended for your site, when in reality it does not matter what you have previously selected, the same plugins always appear and always with the box active by default .
It does not stop here. Once you finish the installation wizard, you have the configuration steps and, in the first one, in the payment one, guess what you will see prominently, in a huge tab , which will almost hide the rest of the options if your screen is not very large . You got it right, WooCommerce Payments!
But there is still more. And you are not happy with this, if you persist in using your own payment gateways, as José Conti reported on Twitter , when you go to the WooCommerce payment settings page on your WordPress site, it may appear inserted over the rest of the payment methods , for you to install it, one more attempt to get you to register WooCommerce Payments .
But on top of that it is badly done (yes, badly bad, in addition to getting into your settings), because it is so capony that it hides the first payment method that you have active from the lists.
It’s one of the most intrusive WordPress dashboard cross-selling systems ever, and look, you ‘ve seen it all .
They all seem wrong to me, but I accept that on the settings page of a plugin they offer me its paid version, but not that they are displayed in any other part of the desktop of your website .
Anyway, in any case the latter is just a detail if you take into account all the above, what is really important when choosing payment gateways for your online store, and I think I have reasoned enough why I do not recommend using WooCommerce Payments as a payment solution.
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